4 ¿Cuáles objetos?
6. De descansar, nadie murió jamás
Additional terms emerged from the dialogue and the group’s efforts to discuss the common features of their respective disciplines and
methodologies. Another set of terms that McLuhan appears to have appropriated from the dialogue was the contrast between “light on” and “light through.” The phrase “light through” appears to have arisen from a comparison between symbolism (and other discontinuous modes) and television. “Light on,” by contrast, was used to illustrate an analogical relationship seen to exist between modes of prose and poetry that admit
108 McLuhan to Ralph Cohen, 13 July 1973.
a greater admixture of rhetoric and “connection” with film.110 In short,
discontinuity and juxtaposition permit “light through” where connection and linearity work by “light on”:
With TV, the viewer is the screen. He is bombarded with light impulses that James Joyce called the “Charge of the Light Brigade” that imbues his “sealskin with sobconscious inklings.” The TV image is visually low in data. The TV image is not a still shot. It is not photo in any sense, but a ceaselessly forming contour of things limned by the scanning-finger. The resulting plastic contour appears by light through, not light on, and the image so formed has the quality of sculpture and icon, rather than of picture. The TV image offers some three million dots per second to the receiver. From these he accepts only a few dozen each instant, from which to make an image.111
The distinction and contrast also enabled McLuhan to point at different organisational principles operative in the plastic arts. For example, McLuhan presents the painting of Kepes as having the quality of light through:
From the air at night, the seeming chaos of the urban area
manifests itself as a delicate embroidery on a dark velvet ground. Gyorgy Kepes has developed these aerial effects of the city at night as a new art form of “landscape by light through” rather than “light on.” His new electric landscapes have complete congruity with the TV image, which also exists by light through rather than by light on.112
By pressing the analogy further, light on and light through become terms that permit the verbalisation of technologies and their effects. They also
110 See McLuhan, “The Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media,” in Understanding Me, 2.
111 Understanding Media, 313. As an aside, it is interesting to note how McLuhan appears to be setting the “scanning-finger” of television in relation to the “writing on the wall” as interpreted by Daniel at Belshazzar’s feats.
become a means of comparing and contrasting “objects” and sensibilities across different periods of history:
In the first place, television does not present a visual image, but an X-ray icon which penetrates our entire organism. Joyce called it “the charge of the light barricade”—part of the Crimean war against mankind. Stained-glass images are not visual either, since they are defined by light through, as in Rouault paintings. The structure of these images is audile-tactile, as in abstract art, both of Symbolist and Cubist kind.113
In sum, keeping in mind that it is a short summation and that it would be relatively easy to add more items here,114 “light on” establishes a basis for
the contemplation of the analogical relationships between: symbolism ~ television image ~ the paintings of Kepes and Rouault ~ cubism ~
sculpture ~ icon ~ stained glass windows (where “~”denotes what Levin calls “significant comparability”).115
Dialogue
What needs to be stressed at this juncture is that neither the terms (e.g. time and space, eye and ear, light-on and light-through), nor the various characterizations of technological effects, nor the analogies that emerged are the most significant aspects of McLuhan’s praxis here.116 Rather,the
“tools” and “language” of the seminar ought to be considered subservient to the “dialogue” which they created and sustained. Dialogue is both the method and primary end of both the seminar and
113 McLuhan to Barbara Ward (Lady Jackson), 9 February 1973.
114 One of the omissions at this point is a discussion of the later Krugman report. See Herbert E. Krugman, "Brain wave Measures of Media Involvement," Journal of Advertising Research 11, no. 1 (1971): 3–9.
115 See Richard Levin, The Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 10.
116 It is McLuhan’s commitment to dialogue and efforts to create dialogue that has made him so difficult for some of his critics and commentators.
Explorations. The small handful of general and universal terms were appropriated on account of their adequacy for discussing changing patterns of organization and sensibility and for enabling seminar
participants to communicate across their various domains by eliminating unwanted specialist noise — a procedure McLuhan referred to as
“frequency modulation”:
There is a real, living unity in our time, as in another, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation. Using Frequency Modulation techniques, one can slice accurately
through such interference, whereas Amplitude Modulation leaves you bouncing on all the currents.117
The elimination of specialist noise was integral to the dialogue that was mandated to transgress disciplinary lines.
McLuhan appears to have understood dialogue as a kind of
interface, and process, requiring at least a double act of translation. Or, in other words, dialogue, as McLuhan both understood and practised it, is not “debate.” Nor is it “dialectical.” McLuhan presents dialogue in “Culture Without Literacy” as an act of making and re-making: “For the dialogue compels each participant to see and recreate his own vision through another sensibility.”118 Alternatively, as McLuhan and Nevitt
state in the later work Take Today, dialogue is, “a process of creating the new” that “came before, and goes beyond, the exchange of ‘equivalents’ that merely reflect or repeat the old.”119
The significance McLuhan affords dialogue is readily apparent when we consider that the very goals, aims, and objectives of the seminar
117 McLuhan to Harold A. Innis, 14 March 1951.
118 McLuhan, “Culture Without Literacy,” in Marshall McLuhan Unbound 6, 20. 119 Take Today, 22.
itself were subject to and arose out of dialogue.120 McLuhan’s rationale
for affording dialogue a pre-eminent place can be seen in his own later writings, where he, both privately and publicly, presents dialogue as the ideal at every level of communication. For example, in a letter to David Riesman, McLuhan writes:
I have long had an indifference to any form of attention that is not based on perceived insight. Opinions, pro or con, are of no interest unless they are backed up by discoveries and knowledge that would contribute to dialogue.121
In a later television appearance McLuhan argues that “human dialogue” is and must ever be the basic form of all civilization (the alternative to which is violence):122
Thus the basic requirement of any system of communication is that it be circular, with, of course, the possibility of self-correction.
120 The Minutes of the fifth meeting record a discussion whereby Carpenter proposes that “language” was the basic study of the seminar. Others however, probably McLuhan himself, say that the mainline work of the seminar was the distortion of message by the medium of the book, newspaper, radio, television. McLuhan’s correspondence of the period indicates that other aims and objectives were probably tabled e.g. that the seminar examine popular culture. Writing to Walter Ong, McLuhan notes: “With
symbolism and pop kultch I find the snag to be that people are predisposed to discuss it but not look at it. We must devise a group which can do this and gradually make its example felt. It is useless to theorize the situation,” (McLuhan to Walter Ong, 16 August 1954).
121 McLuhan to David Riesman, 31 January 1972.
122 McLuhan, “Television is Cool and Radio is Hot,” Monday Conference, Australian Broadcasting Commission, 27 June 1977. That said however, McLuhan also
acknowledged that violence is not always negative – only accidentally so. Writing to the editor of Playboy McLuhan notes how: “T. S. Eliot’s poem, The Wasteland is an act of violence and creative innovation directed towards re-establishing aesthetic and social order,” (McLuhan to A. C. Spectorsky, 20 January 1970). Further, as McLuhan would later note: “…prayer, being one of the most extreme forms of violence, since it is conducted by supernatural force,” (McLuhan, “Violence of the Media,” MS., 1).
That is why presumably the human dialogue is and must ever be the basic form of all civilization.123
We can also see the significance McLuhan afforded dialogue in his diagnosis of his time. Throughout his entire oeuvre McLuhan presents the absence of dialogue, with its inherently “self-corrective nature,” as one of if not the most problematic feature of the contemporary situation. In his review of A Gerald Manley Hopkins Reader McLuhan notes how “…modern communication has no feedback.” A figure on the radio, he states, might still “be an isolated private figure with no experience of his audience.” This “divorce” between artist and public, he argues, seems inherent in new media, and is fatal for the arts given that “it starves and misguides them.”124 McLuhan’s terminology here is less than adequate.
We can, however, get a better approximation of what he is trying to point at by supplementing his comments with others of the period. In “Culture Without Literacy” McLuhan argues:
The radical imperfection in mechanical media is that they are not circular. So far they have become one-way affairs with audience research taking the place of genuine human vision, heckling and response. There is not only the anonymity of press, movies and radio but also the factor of scale. The individual cannot discuss a problem with a huge, mindless bureaucracy like a movie studio or a radio corporation. 125
123 McLuhan, “Culture Without Literacy,” 20.
124 McLuhan, “A Hopkins Reader,” review of A Gerald Manley Hopkins Reader, by John Pick, MS., 9.
125 McLuhan, “Culture Without Literacy,” 20. The ramifications of which are also clearly delineated in the article: “…the ordinary desire of everybody to have everybody else think alike with himself has some explosive implications today. The perfection of the means of communication has given this average power-complex of the human being an enormous extension of expression,” (Ibid., 5).
And writing to Hugh Kenner in 1951 McLuhan emphasises how, in the absence of dialogue, technologies tend to consume their human
operators:
They assume, (consume) the consumer. Any instrument under
human control acquires human characteristics (point not
understood by Norb. [Norbert] Wiener). But any instrument that goes out of human control (via commercial appetites) swallows the operator and consumers. Not just figuratively. “Man will become dirigible” means both “directable [sic] like a missile” and “inflated, conceited, empty, inhuman, stratospheric.126
Throughout the rest of his career McLuhan continues to experiment with new ways of discussing the absence of dialogue. Perhaps, his most successful “formulation” was to talk about media as extensions and/or ablations. Writing to Wilfred and Sheila Watson during the early 1960s
McLuhan states: “Having a look at W L’s [Wyndham Lewis’s] Inferior
Religions … was a shock. Right there on the first page was my media theory — media as ablations of sense and function.” McLuhan continues: “Pre-literate man outers his whole body in his arts. But also, it is the
outered thing, not the outering, that exercises the ablative or numbing and hypnotising effect. Man becomes a puppet of what he outers of himself.” This, McLuhan adds, is the “theme of Blake’s Jerusalem …. It is the innering of what has been outered that hypnotizes,”127 and by extension,
deprives man of his ability to dialogue. Disregarding for a moment the problems in his “formulations,” any of these conditions: (a) man as “dirigible,” (b) outering as exercising an ablative or numbing and
126 McLuhan to Hugh Kenner, 30 January 1951. The letter is also significant as it is one of the sites where McLuhan indicates that his attention has shifted from being primarily interested in “content” to a more comprehensive survey that includes “form.” He says to Kenner that the media… “are dramatic components in our situation, and it is not what they say but what they do that has to be considered,” (Ibid.)
127 McLuhan to Wilfred and Sheila Watson, 6 May 196?. Please note that the identification of the exact year of this letter is problematic.
hypnotising effect, or even, (c) instruments extending their pretensions beyond their sphere and beyond the period of their usefulness (as outlined earlier in my discussion of “Creative Thought and Pragmatism”), bring us to the crux of the matter. As McLuhan understood and practised dialogue, it is the counterpoint of all these conditions. Dialogue requires fully conscious, inter-dependent
“individuals” to be in touch. “Touch,” McLuhan argues, is the space of the gap, the resonant interval, not the connection. It is the gap, rather than the perfect, singular circle that permits change:
If there were any connections there could be no change. The action is where the gap is, change requires the resonant and abrasive interval … whether in the tragic flaw of characters or the chemical bonds of Linus Pauling. The gap created by the complementary forms of white and coloured, of affluence and poverty, war and peace … all engender change.128
Without the possibility of real change, that can only come from detachment, a state of freedom, and individual human autonomy — being “in touch” — there can be no dialogue:
I had not thought of outering as a rectangular wall, but prison it is. Even in the concept of feedback, crude as it is, the return message turns the receiver into a servo-mechanism.129
128 McLuhan to the Editor of New Society, 10 March 1970. Similarly, writing to the editor of Playboy that same year, McLuhan argues that without the discontinuity or interval or gap that comes from “getting in touch” there cannot be the sudden confrontation or awareness which opens the eyes to error. This, he notes, is why the tragic hero must learn through suffering and experience. McLuhan to A. C. Spectorsky, 20 January 1970. 129 McLuhan to Wilfred and Sheila Watson, 27 May 1962. In “A Fresh Perspective on Dialogue,” McLuhan develops the themes, noting that when one sense or faculty is extended in isolation, e.g. eye or ear, because the extension (and consequent ablation) constitutes as William Blake explained a rigidly enclosed system which reinvades the open system of human awareness with metamorphic power. McLuhan, “A Fresh Perspective on Dialogue,” The Superior Student 4 (January/February 1962): 5.
And without dialogue, McLuhan saw, man is merely inclined to “think (and innovate and act) in those modes suitable to and controlled by the media themselves.”130
It would be well to bear in mind the observation of Wyndham Lewis about the man who is in harmony with his technologies — “the well-adjusted man is a robot” – his humanity has been put off and he is a servo-mechanism only.131
New communications media, even before they become so familiar to be unseen, lead the communicators to think (and innovate and act) in those modes suitable to and controlled by the media themselves.132
In the absence of dialogue, McLuhan saw that man is inclined to either one of two extremes: “robotism,”133 or its twin, “angelism.”134 The former,
according to McLuhan, is a state of pure adaptability,135 conformity,136
and somnambulism (possibly engendered by deep audience
participation in their own audience participation). The later, Angelism,
130 McLuhan, “Technology and Media,” MS., 8.
131 McLuhan, and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 65.
132 McLuhan, “Technology and Media,” (paper presented at the Sixth ICOHTEC Symposium, 18 August 1977) MS., 8.
133 “The term ‘robotism’ therefore, as we use it, does not mean the mechanically rigid behaviour of ‘Rossum's Universal Robots,’ as Karel Capek used the word in his 1938 play. Rather robotism in this context means the suppression of the conscious ‘observer- self,’ or conscience, so as to remove all fear and circumspection, all encumbrances to ideal performance. Such a man, as Suzuki says, ‘becomes as the dead, who have passed beyond the necessity of taking thought about the proper course of
action…Therefore to say I will live as one already dead' means a supreme release from conflict,” (The Global Village, 67).
134 The Global Village, 69.
135 McLuhan, “Coping in a Troubled Society,” (Paper presented at the Centaur Enterprises Symposium, 1978), MS. n.pag.
136 McLuhan, interviewed by anon., “Genius or Whimsy? Some McLuhanisms.” The Sunday Post of Canada, 13 May 1979.
McLuhan presents as a state of: “…rigidity of point of view which is largely a consequence of linear and visual logic. It is best characterized as promoting confrontation and fragmentation, some of the chief elements in the illusion of objectivity.”137 Where Angelism emphasizes “the eye
over the ear,” Robotism emphasises the ear over the eye.